Dive! Documentary

Considering Dumpster Diving to be the Answer on Ending World Hunger

By Alyx Rivard

The documentary “Dive!” begins with a group of bearded, hippy-looking men diving through sets of dumpsters and sorting through piles of food waste they would later on consume. This activity was an odd one in itself, but as the film continued the real motive of the goal to end world hunger was revealed suddenly making dumpster diving not so weird after all.

            The 2010 documentary follows director Jeremy Seifert and his friends in Los Angeles as they dumpster dive through a variety of store’s trash and accumulate massive amounts of preserved, still edible food. Not only is the food brought back to their homes and eaten calling it “dumpster delight,” but it is also donated to shelters around the county and used to demonstrate the amount of wasted food in America.

            This isn’t a film about a bunch of eco-extremists sharing with audiences the great fun and enjoyment in diving through other’s trash and unwanted waste; it’s about much more than that. Instead, this is a documentary on the ongoing issue of world hunger and the need to solve this crisis. “The entire country of Haiti could be fed for five years with our food waste in America.” This film is a call to action and a message to all Americans that if we, collectively, care enough as a country, we can help feed not only hungry Americans but also starving people in other countries simply off our so called “trash.”

            “Why should all this food be thrown out instead of given to people who need it?” was an essential question Seifert posed to both citizens and large food corporations. One large generator of edible food waste Seifert targeted was Trader Joe’s who claims to give away left over food daily to food banks, however we were proven otherwise when Seifert dissected a local Joe’s dumpster after closing revealing an abundance of perfectly good food. Seifert depicts actions like these as a product of the laziness of society, saying it’s easier and more convenient to toss left over food in the trash rather than transporting it to local shelters or food banks.

“There’s a certain beauty of turning food from the dumpster into a full meal you can enjoy with your friends and family,” is a quote accurately representing the splendor that can be hidden among something as dirty as trash. The film showed Seifert and his family eating and enjoying healthy, balanced meals each day from food they had saved directly from the dumpsters. They were happy because it saved them money and kept their stomachs full. Seifert’s campaign believes that not all waste should be wasted, and what one may consider unusable, someone else could desperately need and benefit from.

            In the end Seifert leaves us with saying, “We are all responsible for finding a solution.” People need to care enough in order for positive change to develop and this documentary has the persuasiveness to do just that and generate the awareness necessary. The call for individuals to “Eat trash” seems alarming at first but “Dive!” gradually throughout the film makes this concept seem much more acceptable and appealing.

Eat Trash

by Shannon Sullivan

What started off as dumpster diving to save money and salvage food waste from grocery stores turned into a mission to inspire others to stop wasting their food and help the hungry.

Jeremy Seifert takes the viewer on an adventure through the dumpsters of grocery stores to show how much waste is thrown away that can still be salvaged to be eaten.

“Dive!” Living Off America’s Waste follows Seifert and his friends around as they try to figure out why grocery stores are throwing away good food when people are starving.  Seifert is the director; the movie was produced in 2010 and took place in Los Angeles.

Seifert’s mission is to prove to people how wasteful America is with their excess food and how useful our waste could be to eliminate food waste and hunger. 96 billion pounds of food is thrown away every day.  Food makes up 20% of our landfill waste.

He sent the CEO of Trader Joe’s a letter a day for a month to encourage him to donate their excess food to food banks instead of throwing it away.  I think the movie really gets to the heart of how wasteful American’s can be with their food.  It shows that there are people all around the world who are starving and eating mud to stay alive, which is powerful to see.

Seifert wants to get the message across that we are all responsible for wasting food.  We don’t know enough about food to know what is safe to eat and what should not be touched, which makes us more likely to throw away food we are unsure about.

The movie gets to the heart of the issue of hunger in the world, and asks us how we can stop wasting food and give to people that need it.   The dumpster divers get their food from the trash because they can get better food there for free than they could from grocery stores.  They talk about how they believe they have “eaten like the upper class” from the food they found in the dumpsters.

The movie is set up like a home video.  The editing is raw and real.  Seifert and his son, Finn, are the main people focused on in the movie.  The movie uses food at certain parts to achieve points about certain facts in an artistic way.  There are flashbacks of America in the past and the struggles they had with food.  There are clips of starving African children.  There are clips of homeless people struggling.  The way the movie is edited, it tugs at your heart to get you thinking about how you can stop creating unnecessary waste and start helping.  It also made me angry to see how much waste we create everyday.

Seifert tries to interview many people about the wastefulness of throwing good food into dumpsters when people are starving and it could be going to food banks instead.  Most grocery store owners refused to comment on the issue.

Food does not have to be wasted, and that is the main issue that he wants to get across.  So many people are starving and can use the food that stores put in dumpsters.

The movie really emphasizes the fact that we should not waste anything.  Waste is implied to be a bad habit that we must solve by living differently.  Through artistic videography and research of past decades, Seifert creates a moving piece that really gets you to start thinking about what you can do differently to change the staggering statistics that he names about food waste.  His ultimate goal is to inspire people to empower each other and change the way food waste is handled.

Eating Trash Can Taste Good

By: Sofia Picatoste

   Jump into the 2010 documentary called ‘Dive!’ with Jeremy Seifert, a local dumpster diver of Los Angeles who asks not only Trader Joe's but also our nation: Why are we throwing away all this food?

  A film that shows the food consumerism of America, Seifert reports facts on food waste and hunger, says what we can do to help, and speaks to the experts. With that, he realizes speaking to your local grocery store works much better than going to CEO headquarters.

  “In America, we throw away 96 billion pounds of food,” said Seifert in the beginning of the film,”263 million pounds a day, 11 million an hour, and 3 thousand pounds a second.” The start of the film takes off with Seifert and other divers at their favorite hotspot; the dumpsters behind their local Trader Joe's. Digging through bags on bags of food, this documentary does well in capturing the life of Seifert. It depicts his cycle of stealing the “almost expired” food, bringing it home to his wife and two sons Finn and Scout, and then eating the so-called trash.

  The film does an exceptional job on depicting how eating organic, local grown foods as well through quoting Seifert’s friends. “There’s a beauty in seeing garbage turn into a meal while indulging with friends. We cook gourmet food from stuff scrounged out of the garbage!” said another dumpster diver.

   For future dumpster divers, the film gets into detail on what to look for while dumpster diving. “Look, a crate of perfectly good eggs, and only one is cracked,” said another dumpster diver.

   While the film does very well in personalizing Seifert’s trash-eating life with his friends and family, it also dives much deeper than that. It takes us on the journey as Seifert goes to talk with stores face-to-face, and eventually confronting CEO headquarters on the issue of throwing out millions of pounds of food. Many of them refused.

 The document excels in depicting how we reveal ourselves as a society by throwing away the food and resources we consume from our planet Earth. Seifert spoke with Timothy Jones, one of the world's most knowledgeable activists on dumpster diving who has been a part of Eat Trash for 16 years. “If people send the food that is thrown away to the hungry, then hunger can soon end rapidly,” said Jones.

While editing the film, Seifert shows his interview with Jones while transitioning in-between clips of those dying from hunger on the streets in black-and-white film. The viewer is being informed while also feeling sympathetic and moved by the harsh realities shown in the film.

      “There are about 35 million people in the U.S. who don’t know where there next meal is coming from,” said one of the experts interviewed, “There are 11 million people in the U.S. are actually going hungry, and not eating today.” Seifert’s interviews feel raw by simply filming the experts as they state the facts.

    Along with that, the amount of data shown in the middle of the screen in plain, black text is staggering. The powerful statistics hit home for viewers. “Food takes up 20% of landfill waste, producing harmful methane gases,” was shown on screen.

      Not only does Seifert give us all the facts, data, underground knowledge on dumpster diving, he gets to the heart of viewers by quoting knowledgeable figures. The specific quotes tie into this issue of food waste and hunger. “Forfeit your senses of awe, and let your conceit diminish your ability to revere, and the universe becomes a market place for you,” by Abraham Joshua Heschel, a famous Rabbi and theologist.